Words by Emma Warren

Shakka’s microphone has been with him a long time. Fifteen years, to be precise. It’s an AKG C300B that cost ‘maybe £120’. “I come from a place where you just do the best with what you have,” says the Grammy-nominated R&B singer and producer who worked with Michaela Coel on the soundtrack for her breakthrough Chewing Gum E4 show and has a new album ready to drop.

“I’ve had the funds to upgrade the mic, get a Neumann, get a Sony AS whatever, but with the limited resources I had [at the start] I was forced to do the best with it,” says the platinum-selling singer who has collaborated with Dua Lipa, Idris Elba and Sean Paul. “I buried my head into the effects I could use in Logic in order to sculpt my sound and sculpt my voice.”

He chuckles. “I’ve been in other studios where that process is sacrilege. It is important to a degree but once you’ve got the sound, it’s what you do with it that matters, in my opinion.”

The Londoner has a minimal home studio set up, based around an Output Platform desk that contains rack space, cable management, a bridge for monitors, and a keyboard tray. “The majority of my stuff is in the box,” he says listing out ‘a trusty Shure SM7B mic when I want to film myself doing some content but make sure the audio’s still sexy’ as well as a Kontakt keyboard, two sound monitors (ADAM A77s), an Auratone radio speaker, a UAD soundcard and ‘a bunch of hard drives'.

Shakka was schooled at his local Lancaster Youth Centre where he recorded his first EP ‘Foolishness’ in July 2009. Youth clubs and community music production centres have played an important role in the development of British music from the 1970s onwards, with many artists getting their first opportunities in open-access studios and at youth club events. Dizzee Rascal’s first gig, for example, was DJing at his youth club disco under the name DJ Dizzy D. There were a network of youth clubs in Tower Hamlets in the early-mid 2000s that supported emerging artists with studio and event space, including Oxford House in Bethnal Green where artists like Major Ace and Wiley would spit bars before heading to their pirate radio shows, and where recently Bandcamp-tipped MC, producer, and archivist Isatta Sheriff first got on the mic. 

The singer was also schooled by his musician father, who played guitar with 1980s reggae band Brimstone and who toured with Aswad. His dad would arrange for the children of the band members to use a room in the same complex which had old Macs in them. Shakka used the opportunity to make his first pre-teen piece of music: a clone of Nelly’s then-hit ‘Ride Wit Me’ using an early iteration of Cubase. It sounded a lot like the original. “I realised then that my ear was good, that it was attuned to subtleties and shifts and the granular detail of sound.” 

Whilst many of Shakka’s peers were making grime, he was developing his own brand of emotionally articulate London-accented R&B. His Shakka Crown Affair mixtape led to a Top Ten collaboration with Wretch 32 and his Shakkapella series created versions of popular songs by Beyonce or Frank Ocean and mashups (‘Limit To The Blinding Lights’ fused The Streets and James Blake) using harmonies and beatbox.

Major label deals came and went, but he always retained the impulse he learned at the start: of doing things with what you have at the end of your fingertips, and collaborating with people who get you. This is why he’s an R&B singer and producer with a home setup, rather than defaulting to an experienced engineer in a big studio. “It’s expected for an R&B artist to have their own quarterback,” he says. “I record in my flat. There’s a lot of reverberation going on. By rights, I should be hiring a studio, but I think there’s a lot to be said about the personality of sound.

His studio situation was informed by an early experience making music with rapper Incisive circa 2009. “We made a lot of music in his bedroom and his vocal booth was a wardrobe. He would open it ajar and then slide the mic into the centre and perform into the wardrobe. He’d switch the orientation depending on how he wanted it to sound, but that was it. The clothes were absorbing the sound and it didn’t sound like he had a flat wall in front of him. It taught me that I could bring a mic into my home and record.”

This adaptable and responsive methodology helped when he was scoring Chewing Gum for Michaela Coel. They’d encountered each other on the overlapping poetry and music showcase scenes and first worked together in 2013 at the National Theatre when they were performing in a play called Home. He was co-writing the music in-between touring with Basement Jaxx and would make demos in response to rehearsals, working them up with musical director Gareth Valentine. “It was a collaborative endeavour,” he says. “We made some really heartwarming stuff.” 

In 2015 he produced the music for Chewing Gum Series 1 including the theme tune and was music producer for Series 2 two years later. Coel used a demo of album track Take You There for 2020’s I May Destroy You. “Her pen is incomparable,” he says of Coel.

The Chewing Gum brief was to provide a theme tune and music to support scene transitions. He made a bank of around fifty clips, 30-40 seconds in length using ‘chords I thought were dope or drum patterns I thought were sick’. The team loved it and applied his transitions throughout the award-winning show. “It was therapeutic because I rediscovered my love for production and how easy it was for me to be able to come up with many different vibes and many different ideas. It was like being in a time travel machine, going to different areas and bringing them to life.” Recently, he’s been restarting conversations with ‘a few directors and writers’. 

Right now, though, he’s laser-focused on his album, Roadtrip to Venus which contains collaborations with Queen & Slim soundtrack vocalist Tiana Major9, major rapper GoldLink, and West London singer-songwriter Imani Williams. “I’m trying to make it so that guys like me become more vulnerable and emotionally articulate but I can’t do that,” he says. “The only thing I can do is make it the most sexiest expression of that, with the aim of trying to brainwash humans into saying what’s really on their minds and in their hearts. It’s a love letter, a shout-out to the guys who are close to saying what they really feel inside.”

It’s also a love letter to Black British music, in the sense of wanting to expand the possibilities. He begins by expressing admiration for the street-up artform of drill that is attracting moral panic just as grime, garage, drum n bass, and reggae previously attracted moral panic. “Drill is a gorgeous art form. It’s gorgeous because it’s a mirror of the have-nots. It’s a megaphone for the have-nots.”

The difficulty, he says, with a music style that shows the raw elements of street culture ‘is that people may not have a holistic understanding of what street culture looks like’. “For my nieces and nephews who haven’t grown up in that area, they go on Grime Daily and they go on YouTube they see role models. They don’t see the full picture. It’s important for them to have variety in their stratosphere,” he says. “It’s important so they don’t believe that have to adopt one form. No. You just have to be yourself with your whole chest, because confidence trumps everything.”

Shakka: being himself with his whole chest.